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A recent article written by this writer for Global Research posted last Saturday – “The Benghazi Scandal Is Obama’s Watergate But Worse” – was written in an effort to seek and uncover the truth. Accurate reporting on major world events is a challenge in today’s world where propaganda and disinformation are mainstream media norms and where virtually all major players in American politics simply lie through their teeth every time they open their mouths in constant effort to look good and cover up the truth. The American public knows this pathetic and sobering fact that deception has come to rule in the world of both politics and the media. People today neither believe their newscasters nor their political leaders. That is why examining the content of the tidal wave of assertions and opinions spewing forth from politicians and pundits in the aftermath of the latest Benghazi revelations must be taken with a grain of salt. Again, truth in today’s world is hard to come by. But as an investigative reporter, presenting a brief overview of recent comments and statements for any informed citizen to process and digest seems a worthwhile and important enterprise.

A timeline of recently unfolding events: On 10/12/12 exactly one month after the Benghazi incident, the legal conservative group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the Benghazi attack on September 11th, 2012 that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Obama, who had campaigned on a promise of transparency in the criminal wake of the Bush regime, has proven to be anything but open and transparent. Having to sue the US government for access to the records, on April 18th, 2014, a full year and a half later, the Obama administration’s stonewalling ultimately failed and Judicial Watch successfully got hold of 41 State Department Benghazi related documents. Emails between high level White House officials discussing damage control strategies in the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi assault were released last week. Jubilant Republicans are now calling one of those emails their “smoking gun,” believing it is so incriminating that it will do in their would-be opponent Hillary Clinton from potentially competing in the 2016 presidential election.

The newly declassified email written by Obama’s then Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes specifically directed then UN Ambassador Susan Rice in preparation for her Sunday morning talk show appearances on September 16th, 2012 to explain the administration’s take on what it knew of the Benghazi murders. Rhodes advised Rice to attribute the Benghazi uprising as “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy,” pushing talking points designed to bolster Obama’s presidential image as a cool-as-a-cucumber-under-fire kind of wise and benevolent leader and statesman. The major emphasis of the email instructed Rice to blame the bogus anti-Moslem video as inciting a spontaneous protest like in other countries in the region that apparently grew violently out of control, of course all the while knowing that that was a boldface lie. This crucial piece of evidence proves that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both knew that the video did not cause the attack but that they chose to willfully deceive the American public in order to protect their own political careers and hence was born the infamously never ending Benghazi cover-up. Obama and Hillary withheld this damning email evidence even from the House Oversight Committee led by Congressman Darrel Issa (R-CA) requesting all documents pertaining to Benghazi more than a year ago. With the presidential election less than two months away at the time of the attack, Obama and Hillary were determined at all cost to keep hidden from Americans the real truth of criminal Benghazi activity they were guilty of engaging in during the months leading up to the attack. Last Thursday an angry Issa subpoenaed current Secretary of State John Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21st to further explain why those critical State Department records recently given to Judicial Watch were not among the 3200 documents originally handed over to his committee well over a year ago.

Egypt's 50-member constitution committee has approved an article allowing civilians to be tried by military courts. At Wednesday's session, 30 members voted in favour of the article, seven against, with two abstentions. The remaining 11 were absent. The article was approved after it was amended and presented by the panel's military representative. The text of the article refers to direct attacks on military premises, camps, properties and factories; attacks on military zones and border areas, and attacks on military vehicles or personnel while they are carrying out their duties. Crimes related to military documents, secrets or funds are also included in the article.

Several political parties and movements have condemned the article. April 6 Youth Movement founder Ahmed Maher said via Facebook: "No to a constitution that allows military trials of civilians. Have we forgotten the 12,000 civilians that had military trials [during military rule after the January 2011 uprising], including children who are still in jail?" April 6 coordinator Amr Salah said the movement would campaign against the constitution if the article is not removed. Human rights organisations have been calling for a complete ban on trials of civilians by military courts.

As jihadists everywhere celebrate their stunning victories in Mosul and Tikrit, as well as the abject retreat of the United States from Afghanistan, we can only hope that they accord due credit to a man who was indispensable to their success. Now an obscure businessman seeking crumbs from the table as an “international consultant,” Zalmay Khalilzad was in his day an imperial envoy sent by the United States to decree the fates of Afghanistan and Iraq. His decisions, most especially his selection of puppet overseers to administer the conquered lands, were uniformly disastrous, contributing in large degree to the catastrophes of today. To be sure, many others among the neocon clique and their liberal-democrat interventionist allies deserve a place on the jihadist honor roll of useful idiots, but few contributed as much as Khalilzad, the Afghan-born former academic who selected Hamid Karzai and Nuri al-Maliki as suitable leaders for their respective countries. Initially promoted up the ranks of the national-security clerisy by Albert Wohlstetter, the dark eminence of neoconservative theology who also mentored neocon godfather Richard Perle, Khalilzad found a useful niche in such company as the only Muslim any of them knew, ready to spout their militarist nostrums at the flutter of a grant check. I myself got an early intimation of Khalilzad’s tenuous grasp on military reality in 1981, when he assured me in all seriousness that the Afghan mujahideen were enjoying great success in disabling Soviet tanks by thrusting thick carpets into their treads. During the administration of the elder Bush, he worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. In 1992 he wrote the initial draft of the Defense Planning Guidance, which became an iconic neoconservative text.

Khalilzad’s leap out of relative obscurity came with the post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Following the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001, an Afghan Loya Jirga assembly indicated by a clear majority that they wanted their aged king, Zahir Shah, to return from his long exile in Rome to preside over the government. This was not to the taste of presidential special envoy, and later ambassador, Khalilzad, who importuned Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to prevent the Shah from leaving Rome as he meanwhile brusquely informed the Loya Jirga that their leader was to be Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun of modest reputation. Afghan politicians of all stripes concluded that Khalilzad had purposefully picked someone with little internal support in order to ensure that his own authority remained unchallenged. This authority he exercised by operating as supreme warlord, rewarding or threatening the lesser strongmen who had emerged in various provincial power bases with grants of aid or threats of airstrikes from the bombers and Predator drones at his command. Afghans who could foresee the inevitable consequence of this laissez-faire policy toward the universally hated warlords did their best to persuade Khalilzad to change course. One of them later related to me that he suggested that Khalilzad put “ten of them in handcuffs and ship them off to the International Court at The Hague for crimes against humanity.”

“I’m going to bring them in and demobilize them,” countered Khalilzad confidently. “No, Zal,” replied the Afghan sadly, “you’re going to legitimize them.” So it transpired. While Karzai presided, in his self-designed costume of furry hat and cape, over a regime of staggering corruption, large swaths of Afghanistan fell under the control of characters like Hazrat Ali, a ruffian of pliable loyalties who used American support to gain control of the eastern city of Jalalabad and installed himself, with Khalilzad’s approval, as security chief of Nangahar Province. He then began vying with fellow warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzada for the title of world’s leading heroin trafficker (a practice both men denied engaging in) while delivering hapless victims labeled “high value targets” to the torture cells of Bagram or the oubliette of Guantánamo. In inevitable consequence, disgusted Afghans rallied to a resurgent Taliban. The rest is history.

Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives "In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."

A bombshell White House memo has revealed for the first time details of the ‘deal in blood’ forged by George Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq War.The damning memo, from secretary of state Colin Powell to president George Bush, was written on March 28, 2002, a week before Bush’s famous summit with Blair at his Crawford ranch in Texas.The Powell document, headed ‘Secret... Memorandum for the President’, lifts the lid on how Blair and Bush secretly plotted the war behind closed doors at Crawford. In it, Powell tells Bush that Blair ‘will be with us’ on military action. Powell assures the president: ‘The UK will follow our lead’.The classified document also discloses that Blair agreed to act as a glorified spin doctor for the president by presenting ‘public affairs lines’ to convince a skeptical public that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction - when none existed.In return, the president would flatter Blair’s ego and give the impression that Britain was not America’s poodle but an equal partner in the ‘special relationship’. 

The sensational leak shows that Blair had given an unqualified pledge to sign up to the conflict a year before the invasion started.It flies in the face of the UK Prime Minister’s public claims at the time that he was seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis.He told voters: ‘We’re not proposing military action’ - in direct contrast to what the secret email now reveals. 

The disclosure is certain to lead for calls for Sir John Chilcot to reopen his inquiry into the Iraq War if, as is believed, he has not seen the Powell memo.A second explosive memo from the same cache also reveals how Bush used ‘spies’ in the Labour Party to help him to manipulate British public opinion in favor of the war.The documents, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, are part of a batch of secret emails held on the private server of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton which U.S. courts have forced her to reveal.Former UK Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said: ‘The memos prove in explicit terms what many of us have believed all along: Tony Blair effectively agreed to act as a frontman for American foreign policy in advance of any decision by the House of Commons or the British Cabinet.

The last British soldiers were airlifted out of Afghanistan last week, marking the sorry end of Britain’s fourth failed invasion of Afghanistan. With them went the last detachment of US Marines in Helmand. Well has Afghanistan earned its title, “Graveyard of Empires.” To be more precise, this honor belongs to Afghanistan’s Pashtun (or Pathan) mountain tribes, who bend their knees for no man and take pride in war.

The US garrison in Kabul will continue to make Afghanistan safe for opium, which is the base for heroin. Americans have simply turned a blind eye to their ownership if the world’s top producer of heroin. As Washington orates about the so-called War on Drugs, Afghan opium production rose in 2013 from $2 billion to $3 billion. The UN says over 500,000 acres of land in Afghanistan are now devoted to the opium poppy – right under the eyes of the US garrison. While US-installed rulers in Kabul pay lip service to opium eradication, the rural warlords who support them, and receive stipends from CIA, continue to grow rich on the opium trade. Trying to blame Taliban for the scourge of opium is dishonest: when Taliban was in power it eradicated almost all of the nation’s opium production, reported he UN Drug Agency, except in the region controlled by the Communist Northern Alliance – which today shares power in Kabul. When the full history of the Afghan war is finally written, CIA’s involvement in that nation’s drug trade will become a notorious episode. French intelligence became deeply involved in the Laotian opium trade to pay its Lao mercenaries. The US was up to its ears with its Contra allies in the Central American cocaine trade.

Any native “disturbance” would be bombed and strafed by the RAF. In the 1920’s, Winston Churchill authorized RAF to use poison gas bombs against restive Pashtun and Kurdish tribesmen. Ironically, seven decades later I discovered British scientists who had been sent by HM government to Iraq to build germ weapons for Saddam Hussein to use against Iran. Similarly, the “Pax Americana” will be enforced by US airpower based at Bagram. US warplanes flying from Bagram, Qatar, and aircraft carriers on 24 hour call have been the only force keeping the Pashtun movement Taliban at bay. Without intense employment of US air power, western occupation forces, like the Imperial British armies before them, would have been driven from Afghanistan. Without US air power, garrison troops and large numbers of “civilian contractors” and old-fashioned mercenaries the Kabul puppet regime would soon be swept away. Afghanistan’s government army is likely to collapse as quickly as Iraq’s did before ISIS. Most of southern Afghanistan would declare for Taliban which, however harsh, is the nation’s only authentic political movement apart from the Tajik and Uzbek Communists in the north.